(NEW YORK — September 22, 2026) Rare, the Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA), and Levoca today announced the launch of Deep Blue, a new outcomes payment facility designed to unlock larger, longer-term pools of capital for community-led ocean conservation. Deep Blue was launched during a meeting of conservation, finance, and philanthropic leaders at the offices of UBS in New York City during Climate Week NYC. The feasibility study for this facility was supported through ORRAA by Builders Vision Philanthropy.
Deep Blue is designed to address one of the largest barriers to scaling outcomes-based finance (OBF): securing outcome funding early enough, and at sufficient scale, to give investors confidence that successful projects can be repaid. Rather than securing outcome funding one transaction at a time, Deep Blue is designed to aggregate funding from governments, philanthropies, multilateral institutions, and other partners and deploy it across a portfolio of ocean conservation initiatives.
“The future of ocean finance will not be defined by larger grants alone,” said Kate Schweigart, Senior Vice President of Innovative Finance at Rare. “It will be defined by better financial architecture. Deep Blue is designed to help build that architecture so that proven conservation solutions can access the capital they need to achieve lasting results for people and nature.”
“The Ocean has always generated enormous value, for climate, for food security, for the resilient coastlines that hundreds of millions of people depend on. Conventional finance has never known how to pay for it,” said Melissa Walsh, Director of Blue Finance Innovation ORRAA. “Deep Blue changes that, turning verified ocean outcomes into transparent commitments that funders can trust, and that delivers long term financing supporting community resilience and nature regeneration.”
“The ocean finance gap has never been only a shortage of capital. It is the absence of a dependable way to pay for ocean value,” said Zach Levey, Chief Executive Officer at Levoca. “Deep Blue pools outcome funding and commits it in advance, so a verified result, such as a recovering fishery or a protected reef, becomes a payment a project can be financed against. Funders pay for what they get rather than what they fund, and each transaction makes the next one faster and cheaper to close.”
The ocean generates extraordinary value for people and the planet, supporting livelihoods and food security, protecting coastlines, storing carbon and sustaining irreplaceable biodiversity. Yet many of the conservation solutions that generate these benefits struggle to attract investment because their environmental and social value does not translate into the predictable cash flows conventional investors require. The result is a fundamental financing gap: proven solutions can remain underfunded not because they lack impact, but because financial markets lack a mechanism to value that impact.
Outcomes-based finance changes the relationship between funding and performance. Investors and other catalytic funders provide upfront capital so conservation work can begin and continue over multiple years. Outcome funders—including governments and philanthropies—commit to payments tied to measurable results. Independent verification determines whether agreed outcomes have been achieved and when payments are warranted. This allows capital to be structured around results rather than a predetermined set of activities, while giving implementers flexibility to learn and adapt during implementation.
Building portfolios, not projects
Deep Blue is designed to build portfolios, not projects. Standardized approaches to project readiness, governance, contracting, measurement, and verification can reduce transaction costs, lower the cost of capital and make it easier to move from isolated pilots toward a repeatable market for verified ocean outcomes.
Deep Blue’s current ambition is a first close of approximately US$50 million, with the potential to grow toward a US$100 million facility supporting a diversified portfolio of community-led ocean solutions. The facility is intended to support outcomes across areas such as sustainable fisheries, marine protected and conserved areas, mangroves, coral reefs, coastal resilience and other interventions capable of delivering measurable benefits for ocean biodiversity and coastal communities.
“Some of the most important ecosystems on Earth are managed by communities that global financial markets largely overlook,” said Brett Jenks, CEO of Rare. “If we want capital to reach the places where people and biodiversity intersect, we have to make coastal communities and ecosystems investable without asking communities to give up control of the natural resources on which they depend. Deep Blue is about creating the financial architecture to do that—rewarding measurable improvements in ecosystem health and human well-being and directing more capital toward the people delivering those results.”
“The Deep Blue Outcomes Finance Facility takes a tried and tested financial tool that has been widely used in the social sector and brings it to coastal communities and the Ocean,” said Karen Sack, Executive Director of ORRAA. “The financing mechanism is not novel, turning it blue is. ORRAA was excited to work with Rare, a founding member of the Alliance, on the Small-Scale Fisheries Bond in Indonesia, and now very much looking forward to partnering with Rare and Levoca as we turn the feasibility work we have done together to build-out of a new facility under the umbrella of our Sea Change Impact Financing Facility.”
From proof point to platform
Deep Blue builds on Rare’s experience developing the Small-Scale Fisheries Impact Bond in Indonesia, the world’s first impact bond dedicated to small-scale fisheries. The five-year Impact Bond mobilized US$2.1 million in upfront investment against up to US$6 million in outcome funding to establish and strengthen community-led fisheries management and ocean conservation across three sites spanning 31 villages in Southeast Sulawesi. The structure links financing to the foundations of effective community-led management as well as deeper ecological performance. ORRAA with support from the United Kingdom’s Blue Planet Fund was the first outcome funder for this bond.
Rare’s broader outcomes-based finance portfolio is now moving from proof point, to portfolio, to platform. In addition to expanding the small-scale fisheries model, Rare is developing a land-to-sea OBF initiative in Colombia connecting cacao, mangrove fisheries and biodiversity, and a “Beyond Carbon” model in Brazil designed to value mangrove benefits including biodiversity, ecosystem resilience, sustainable livelihoods and community stewardship. Across the portfolio, Rare’s approach is consistent: science and evidence lead, finance follows. The goal is not to replace philanthropy or public funding, but to use those resources strategically to reward verified success, attract additional capital and create longer-term financing pathways for proven, community-led conservation.
—
About Rare
Rare is a global leader in community-led conservation. For more than 50 years, we have partnered with local communities worldwide to strengthen their stewardship of the lands and waters they depend on. Today, Rare works in some of the world’s most biodiverse places, where climate risks are high and community-led conservation can deliver the greatest impact. We combine community-driven solutions with behavioral science, partnerships, financing, and practical innovation to create the conditions for conservation to succeed. By helping make local leadership the foundation of conservation, we strengthen resilience for people and nature.
About ORRAA
The Ocean Risk and Resilience Action Alliance (ORRAA) is the only multi-sector collaboration connecting the finance and insurance sectors, governments, multilateral organisations, civil society, and academia to pioneer finance and insurance products that incentivise investment into coastal and ocean resilience, and a regenerating ocean through Nature-based Solutions.
The mission, by 2030, is to activate at least $500 million of investment through finance and insurance products to build the resilience of 250 million climate vulnerable coastal people in the Global South.
ORRAA is delivering system-wide change by growing an investable product pipeline and generating the transformative investment instruments, vehicles and policies that contribute to a regenerative and sustainable ocean and blue economy. These solutions enable coastal communities and the Ocean to adapt and thrive, creating greater economic, social and cultural resilience.
About Levoca
Levoca is an impact finance intermediary and advisory firm based in Miami, Florida, and a specialist in outcomes-based finance. Levoca designs and structures outcomes-based finance instruments with multilateral and bilateral development finance institutions, governments and philanthropies, with deep experience in conservation, ocean and fisheries finance. Levoca co-designed the Small-Scale Fisheries Impact Bond in Indonesia with Rare and serves as Secretariat of the Outcomes Finance Alliance (OFA). Within Deep Blue, Levoca serves as Secretariat and technical platform manager, responsible for pipeline development, project design and appraisal, and portfolio supervision. www.levoca.org
Media Contact:
Rare: Zach Lowe – zlowe@rare.org
ORRAA: Amelia McKinlay – Amelia.McKinlay@oceanriskalliance.org
Levoca: Alessandra Pelliccia – alessandra@levoca.org